I remember working on OS/390 and doing COBOL stuff. I understand how "important" money transactions are. Every time I make a transaction with my VISA or a wir

I remember working on OS/390 and doing COBOL stuff. I understand how "important" money transactions are. Every time I make a transaction with my VISA or a wire transfer a mainframe is implicated in the process. We get it. It's important. But what has changed in the last 20 years? Credit cards payments? Not really. What has changed is that I know have ubiquitous Internet access, things like Google Maps or Open Maps, things like blogs, forums/discussions websites like Hacker News, eBay, Amazon, price comparators, plane fligths finders, StackOverflow and Quora and all the others helping to disseminate knowledge, Youtube and Vimeo, online university lessons, on demand computer instances and storage and so many other things. So, sure, I could have decided to work on back-end payment processing. We get it. It's important. But young programmers much prefer to either work for --or try to build-- companies shaping the future. And it very much looks like the future ain't build on mainframe computers...